Radio Rental - Episode 62

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

On today's tapes... >> Snipe Hunting > Robert the Doll

I am so dreading groceries this week. Why? You can skip it. Oh, what? Just like that? Just like that. How about dinner with my third cousin? Skip it. Prince Fluffy's favorite treats? Skippable.

Midnight snacks? Skip. My neighbor's nightly saxophone practices? Uh, nope. You're on your own there. Could've skipped it. Should've skipped it. Skip to the good part and get groceries, meals, and more delivered right to your door on Skip. What could make your listening experience even better? Your feedback helps us grow and deliver the content you care about most. It's super simple. Just fill out our quick survey.

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Subscribe to Tenderfoot Plus to get early access to episodes, ad-free listening, and bonus scary stories. Visit tenorfootplus.com for details. The following podcast includes scary stories, with content that could be triggering to some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. Take a break from the same old boring blockbusters and experience a new kind of movie night with Radio Rental.

At Radio Rental, our videos come to life in your living room, defy all logic and reasoning, and make you question your own reality. This is not your ordinary video rental store. At Radio Rental, we carry one-of-a-kind videos so frightening, so mind-bending, you won't be able to sleep at night. You've gone Radio Rental. Oh boy, not another one. God damn it.

Oh, hello! Hello there! Welcome in. Welcome. If you're new here, I'm Terry Carnation, and you've found yourself at Radio Rental, a VHS rental shop that houses a collection of the scariest true horror stories you've ever heard. Anyway, you've caught me in a bit of a bad mood today. Upon receiving a few angry comments from disgruntled parents, I just recently discovered that a bunch of my VHS tapes are actually in the wrong sleeves. As you can probably imagine, that's created a lot of problems. Dumb and Dumber was in Dr. Zhivago. Memoirs of a Geisha was inside of the When Harry Met Sally

sleeve. But the worst so far was the Texas Chainsaw Massacre inside the box for... the Aristocats? Poor kitties wanted kittens lapping up milk, and they got Leatherface sledgehammering some Texans. I am so sorry to whatever kitty checked that one out. I guess their parents can just forward me their therapy bills the rest of their life. Side note, Friday the 13th Part 4 was in the Friday the 13th Part 6 sleeve,

and no one ever seemed to notice. Anyway, why don't we pop in a scary tape for you while I sort out the rest of this mess, huh? Here we go. Hi there. My name is Terrence Carnation. I'm 6'2", 52 years old. And this is my audition tape for Survivor.

Okay, okay. On the weekends, you can find me bench pressing. Yeah, okay. Oh, God, that's terrible. It looks like these tapes are mixed up, too. Anyway, don't worry about that. You weren't supposed to see that. Okay, yes, truth be told, I submitted to Survivor.

No, they didn't take me. Their loss. Because my tape is awesome. I ate five ostrich eggs on it. But anyways, now's not the time. Here is a scary story for you. And really hoping that this one isn't my audition for So You Think You Can Dance. I was newly engaged. Before my fiancé at the time and I were going to get married, my brother-in-law wanted to go on a camping trip. My fiancé and I were native Coloradans and we are big into outdoor everything.

We also had purchased a new truck and we're kind of excited to take it out on a maiden voyage camping trip. So we had gotten all of our camping stuff all loaded up and we're really excited to take this truck as far back into the woods and unpaved wilderness as we could get it. So we had gone along with my brother-in-law

and my three nephews. We decided as our camping trip, we were going to go to this area in Northern Colorado called the Red Feather Lakes. It's kind of an isolated area. There's a town the Red Feather Lakes. It's kind of an isolated area. There's a town in Red Feather Lakes that I don't think has more than a couple hundred people that live there.

Miles and miles and miles of logging, rogues, forest access, national forest land, and Bureau of Land Management, campsites and everything. We had packed everything for a four-day camping trip, and we decided this time we were going to just head as deep into the woods as we could get. It was close to about 20 miles by the time all was said and done. And back there, they have campsites that are spaced out every half mile or so. And then you get further back, and they're every mile,

and then every two miles. And we had gone from standard unpaved dirt forest trails to kind of more technical off-roading and all that. And it was kind of late in the season for camping, so we hadn't really seen very many other campers out there. There were a couple that seemed like they were hacking up kind of at the entrance to the forest. Once we were probably a mile or two back into the woods there was nothing. We had found this campsite that was pristine, it was beautiful. We had

gotten all set up on the first day. We had brought lots of games for the boys because we had these three young boys out there with us. So we did lots of stuff like cornhole and board games. We went fishing. They were all kind of excited because I had brought out a couple of little.22 rifles that they wanted to go planking with.

So we had like a little firearm safety talk and class and all that for about half an hour. One by one, we had them, you know, take turns shooting a little.22 back there. That night, we noticed that the dogs just got really on edge. My dog and my brother-in-law's dog, they're very experienced camping. They have been out in the woods. They've gone on a whole bunch of camping trips, and they're used to seeing deer and all sorts of wildlife.

So it kind of seemed out of character for them. Their hackles were up, and they started kind of patrolling the edge of our camp. We weren't too on guard with the whole thing. Earlier in the day, we had gone out into the woods quite a bit. Hikes in the areas and all that. And we hadn't seen any other campers in the area.

We hadn't noticed anything unusual or anything like that. The way, at least I kind of figured it at the time, was that maybe there was some sort of skunk or something like that. It was the second day that we continued to do kind of normal camping activities. We had probably gone a mile in every direction from our camp. We'd go a mile in one way and then we'd come back.

After about half an hour, the boys would go on another hike and we'd go out in the other direction and just exploring the woods and seeing what there was to see. That night, we got the boys all put away for bed. My wife, my brother-in-law and I stayed up around the campfire until 1 a.m. All this time, the dogs have just kind of been acting on edge.

Once every hour, they're getting up and they're running around and they're kind of patrolling the edge of our campground or they're acting strange on our hikes or they're looking behind us. Really just kind of on guard the whole time. So that night when we went to bed, I was starting to feel kind of on guard the whole time. So that night when we went to bed, I was starting to feel kind of uneasy. I don't think I hardly slept at all. I was laying there in the tent, tossing and turning.

I feel like I was more in one of those types of sleep where you're still hearing the noises around you. Time might be passing by a little bit faster, but you're just kind of laying there listening around you. And I would hear, you know, like twigs snapping the woods and all of a sudden I'm wide awake again and then dozing back off. I was kind of expecting the next day when we woke up

to see our campsite had some sort of footprints or tracks or something like that through it. Some sort of bear, some sort of deer wandering through the site, anything like that. I was looking around and I didn't see anything, but I did notice one of our water jugs all underneath it was just soaked. And we had at least six of them. They were five gallon water jugs and they have like a little pull tab spigot that pulls out on them. The water jug was just completely drained.

I was thinking like, did somebody come into our camp and just drain our water? Or are they trying to run us out of here? I didn't see any footprints and we had more water with us than just that one five gallon jug. So we weren't too stressed about it. I had other water in my truck and my brother had other water in his car. Maybe, you know, my nephews, one of them had woken up in the middle of the night and

gotten some water or something like that and forgotten to close it. We had decided on that third day that the dogs seemed so uncomfortable and we were kind of starting to think like, you know, if these dogs have been on eggs for so long, maybe we'll just pack it in a day early, but we weren't in any hurry. We cooked breakfast and we started packing up a little bit and by the time we had gotten everything halfway loaded, the dogs were getting increasingly agitated. They were barking off into the woods. They were just acting so upset.

Very unusual behavior for them. By the time we had gotten to fully loading into our vehicles, it was getting close to dinner time at that point. We had really taken our time. We decided, all right, have dinner, and then we'll make our way back to the town while there's still light. From there, it's just a couple hour drive back to our homes.

My nephews were a little bit irritated because on every camping trip, we will go out snipe hunting. When you have a younger party of children with you when you're out camping, you'll talk about the snipe, and the snipe is different for everybody. It's this made-up creature that usually you'll go off with a younger party of kigs in your camp and you'll go looking through the woods for the snipe just to, you know, keep the younger kigs occupied while you're out camping. What our routine with snipe hunting is, we'll form kind of a single file line. My brother-in-law, he'll lead us in a big, wide, round circle that kind of leads us back to the

campsite. He'll take the front. My fiancee this time, she was in the middle of the boys and I was in the back of the line. I was picking up small rocks and sticks and things like that. And when it was very clear that they weren't looking in my direction i would throw a rock off to the right of our group or i'd throw a stick over to the left and my fiancee at the time she would go did you did you hear that over there what was that you know and the little boys they would gasp oh my goodness i think it's the snipe we went pretty deep into the woods. I'm throwing rocks off in this direction, and every now and then I throw some off in that direction.

We've been out there for about 15 minutes or so. A big rock, maybe about a softball size, just comes in and lands right in the middle of our group. We landed closest to my fiancee. It landed right at her feet. She looked at me and my brother-in-law looked at me. What the heck are you doing? That is a big rock that you just threw over here. I can just see in their eyes and I'm looking back at them like, I didn't throw that rock. My nephews were all startled and excited, oh my gosh the snipe has thrown this big old rock at us.

I didn't see it come in, I just saw it land. And so I thought maybe it fell off of something. But I'm looking around and where we were standing was kind of flat forest area. We had been standing there for not more than 10 seconds. Just kind of looking back and forth at each other. When another rock came out of the woods and hit me in the chest. It winded me it caught us incredibly off-guard but I think at this point all of a sudden the docks connecting for me somebody's throwing rocks at us and I couldn't see where they were at all. We just started running. We tried to kind of play it off a little bit cool for my nephews, but we just kind of said, like, oh my gosh, this is a mean snipe.

We need to run back to the car. And so we're running back to the car, but we don't know what the heck is going on. We start just driving out of the campsite. My brother pulls out of the campsite first, I pull out second. The road was pretty rough leaving the campsite. Rougher than what you would kind of expect of normal forest road. We got maybe a half mile from our campsite and we come around the bend there was stuff kind of like littering all over the road I looked like there were sticks and just

like maybe like trash bags and stuff like that well as we get closer we're coming up on it we're looking out the window there's bones bones in all sorts of conditioning some of them still had clumps of fur and meat attached to them i remember seeing what looked like a big femur in the road other ones were like actual carcasses. As we kind of continued further along the trail there were beheaded elk. There was such a mess and a mangle of just flesh. There were just bones and rotting carcasses and everything that we were having to drive and maneuver around to go down this trail. We were afraid that we were going to drive over some sort of antlers and pop

a tire. We just continued down the road avoiding what we could but you know we did end up having to run over a couple bodies of what looked like smaller animals. Everything was so mangled it was hard to tell what was what. This was what felt like 20 minutes of just driving and navigating and maneuvering around all this. But it's just like this gore of just animal remnants that not only that are spread all over the road but they weren't there when you got there and so close to our campsite a half mile at the most we went further down the road for another five minutes or so. But again, this is really rough terrain.

It's slow traveling. We pull up to this opening in the woods where it looked like somebody else had set up camp. I had stopped my truck. My brother-in-law, he just decided to continue on. But I thought, I'm going gonna go tell these other campers, you guys might want to pack up. There's something weird going on here. So I pulled up to this campsite, not leaving the road, and started walking over to this campsite. I could see that there was a green bus. As I got closer to the bus, I started to notice the windows were covered with what looked like

paper, maybe like butcher's paper or something like that, covering all the windows from the inside. I could see that there was spray-painted symbols all over it. It looked like a number of different stars, like a pentagram-type star. One particular large star on the side of the bus has nine points on it. The paper that was covering the window had a lot of these same symbols on them. What it looked like to me was something out of the Blair Witch Project. As I'm approaching this bus, I'm getting incredibly uncomfortable to the point that I decide, like, I'm not even going to go all the way up and knock on the door. And I look and I see that they have a fire pit probably 50 feet or so away from the bus.

On my way back over to my truck, I glance over into the fire pit and this fire pit had 40 animals worth of just bones. Moose antlers, a number of what looked like femurs. It looked like a gore pit. There were so many bones. Looking around, there's weird things hanging from the trees around everywhere. There was what looked like some sort of chipmunk or some sort of mountain squirrel strung out by its hands and arms or paws or whatever that was hanging from the trees crucifix style didn't see any sign of anybody i just booked it back to the truck when i got back into the truck i said to her my fiance this is some hills have eyes shit. We floored it rally racing through the forest on this single lane dirt road. We were driving so quickly and it was getting so dark. We were so freaked out we didn't want to be

in the woods, in those woods after dark. But the whole time we were driving out we were just, what was that? What was that? I don't know. We just need to get out of here. We need to get back to the town. When we did get back into cell service, we did call the county sheriff and told them what we had happened. We gave them our phone numbers and everything. and then they said that they would pass it on to the Parks and Wildlife officers that patrol that area.

I had gotten a call maybe like two weeks later. They just told me, yeah, we went and drove back in that area, but we didn't see anything. Wow, what a harrowing story. Ooh, that gives me the creeps. But also, please don't tell Malachi that snipes aren't real. Sometimes when I forget to buy him food, I say that the snipes got to it first,

and I really don't want to backtrack on a decade's worth of lies and manipulation. Malachi can be very punitive. Moving on. Anyway, let's hear from some scintillating sponsors. You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces. A message from the Government of Canada.

This is an ad by BetterHelp. What comes to mind when you hear the word gratitude? Maybe it's a daily practice. Or maybe it feels hard to be grateful right now. Don't forget to give yourself some thanks by investing in your well-being. BetterHelp is the largest online therapy provider in the world, connecting you to qualified professionals via phone, video, or message chat. Let the gratitude flow.

Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% on your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. And we're back. Time for another scary story. Roll the tape. Now I have to walk over here and actually press play, but pretend it started immediately, which would have been so much cooler. It was the summer of 2021. I was going to Key West for the first time with my boyfriend's family. They had recently gotten a condo a few hours north. They were really excited to show me everything that Key West had to offer. One of the days that we were staying there, we decided to see all the local attractions like Ernest Hemingway's house, Duval Street, and the Key West Museum.

I was particularly excited about the Key West Museum. I knew that Robert the Doll lived there. Robert the Doll is supposedly cursed and belonged to a little boy in the early 1900s. He was given the doll when he was four. and belonged to a little boy in the early 1900s. He was given the doll when he was four. The lore is that Robert Eugene Otto was given the doll by a servant of his family in 1904. The servant supposedly was very poorly mistreated and put a curse on the doll. This led to an attachment

between the doll and Gene. Gene would always refer to the doll as his friend, and he named the doll after himself. He named him Robert. Weird things started happening in their house growing up. He would cause things to move, destroy other toys, really, like, be a menace in their household. Gene's parents would always get mad at him and say he's making a mess and tell him to stop, but his only response would always be,

Robert did it. As Gene grew up, got married, he couldn't let go of the doll. After he passed, his wife donated the doll to the Key West Museum, because they had a house down there. The museum took the doll and was like, I guess we'll have it.

After they put it in a box, something not secure, he would move things around in the museum and continue to just do, like, malevolent things. People knew that something was just off about it, so they put it in a glass case. When people visit, you have to be very respectful. It's just something Robert likes, for people to ask permission to take his picture verbally.

Very respectfully, can I take your picture? That's how the doll got started. I knew a lot about Robert the doll's history before I went to the Key West Museum. Really, Robert is the main event of the museum. More than anything, I wanted to know if when you were around the doll, if you could feel that unease almost radiating from it, just for the sake of curiosity. We finally passed through the other exhibits.

We walked into Robert's room, and it's this sort of stone open exhibit where Robert is in the middle. It's a stuffed boy doll that's about three feet tall in a sailor's costume, and he has a teddy bear in this glass case, and he has letters in his case. He looks a little raggedy, beaten up. I thought that because of his demeanor and look and the lore, I was expecting to feel maybe a cold rush or a tingling of the spine, something that indicated that something was off with the doll.

I was going to immediately want to get out of the room or have some sort of reaction other than just feeling like it was a doll. You know what, maybe the stories were just made up and this was something that was way overhyped and I got too excited about it. It's no big deal. I was more curious about what would happen if I took a picture.

Even after listening to the lore and several scary podcasts of people saying not to do it, I thought, you know what, I was also expecting to feel the evil radiating off the doll, and I didn't feel that, so why not just take a picture to remember? I took a picture with the camera facing the doll and a thumbs up. I sent it to some friends just to show them, hey, I did it. Robert's not that scary. I did not ask permission. We finished walking through the museum.

I got a t-shirt, a Robert the Doll t-shirt on sale. After that, we went about the rest of the day in Key West, shopping, looking at other historical places. Later that night when I was going to bed, the same room that I had the whole week, woke up in the middle of the night, decided to check my phone. My phone had been plugged in on the mattress, the same charger and same outlet

that I'd used in previous nights. When I went to pick it up, it was searing hot. It felt like it was about to start an electrical fire or burn a hole through the mattress. I immediately unplugged it after seeing that it was on and had no warnings and just wait for it to cool down. Woke up in the morning to find my phone unable to turn on. And after attempting several resolutions, my phone was never to turn on again for the rest of the trip.

Immediately, I correlated with what I had done the day before. I thought, there's absolutely no way this happened to me. After the trip, we went to a repair store. They had asked what I had done to get my phone to this state. If I had left it in the sun, if there was water damage, what could have caused this heavy of damage to the phone? I hadn't done anything besides plug it in with the brand charger. The phone was not repairable. I had to get a new one. On that new phone, reinstalled Google Drive, which had backed up my photos. Once I had viewed all of the images that were backed up from the trip, I knew I was looking

for one picture because I didn't want it on the new phone. I wanted to get rid of the memory of that, even if it was potentially a coincidence. But I couldn't find the one Robert picture that I had taken that day. There were pictures from earlier that day, and there were pictures after the museum, but there was not the Robert picture. My friends still had it. Family still had it in our texts.

That was very unsettling, and I definitely immediately thought of Robert. It was because of the picture. The coincidence was just too strong. I mean, hours apart that I took the picture, and then my phone started having issues. And the fact that there were so many and has been so many other reports,

it's a little hard to believe it's a coincidence. I would say I was feeling like I was being haunted, almost like he's over my shoulder. It was a few weeks later, I had moved into my college apartment with one of my friends that I had sent the picture to. We started living together, and it was kind of immediate that our apartment was not a happy place to be. It wasn't home feeling. It wasn't restful. We just felt very unsettled there and couldn't really put a finger on why. But we knew at the end of the day, it was not a place we wanted to be. After a particularly hard day, I got in a car accident.

The effects of that car accident have definitely lasted to today. It was really soon after that incident that I thought about Robert having a hand in it. Because of the amount of people that have visited and either not been respectful or taken a picture and not asked permission that have had bad luck or had medical issues. I was really starting to honestly feel like an idiot for taking the picture because now it was starting to physically impact me. I can't believe I took that picture. The letters around his glass box

are letters from people who have either been rude or taken pictures and not asked permission or visited Robert and then just started to have terrible things happen to them, they write an apology letter to him. They ask for the bad things to stop happening. Robert, I know I didn't ask your permission. Very remorseful for having done that. And I apologize.

And I hope that you can accept the apology. And I hope the Doll story. You know, I have my own Robert the Doll story. I, too, went to visit him when I was down in Key West, and, well, I was pretty inebriated after a day on Duval Street, I'll admit it. Anyway, I refused to cower to a doll, so I walked or stumbled right up to his little glass cage, and I said,

well, I don't know if I should repeat it. It was pretty foul. I used some pretty graphic doll language. But I swear to God, ever since then, I haven't been able to find my sunglasses. Ever. This is since 1997. So I'm just saying.

I know that stuffed boy cursed me too. But I refuse to apologize. Anyways, let's break for an ad. Also, when in Key West, be sure to get the key lime pie and the conch fritters. You won't regret it. Metrolinx and Crosslinx are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks.

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Like probably right here. Okay, welcome back. So I've finally gotten most of these tapes back into their rightful sleeves. Oh my God, there could have been some bad ones. Ghost Dad, with Bill Cosby, was in Ghost. Peeping Tom was inside the box

for Tom and Jerry, the movie. Ooh, absolutely horrifying. That was a close one. I could have been sued for that. Anyway, I don't know who mixed these up,

but I have a sinking suspicion that this was a parting prank from my demonic niece, Susie, who visited me last year. Just one last act of mischief right before she left. Lovely. Anyway, it's been so nice sharing some spookiness again with you today. Make sure to come back again next time, and we'll do it all over again,

right here at Radio Rental. Radio Rental is created by Payne Lindsay and brought to you by Tenderfoot TV. Lead producer is Eric Quintana. Executive producers are Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright. Thank you. Editing by Eric Quintana, Mike Rooney, Stephen Perez, and Meredith Steadman. Sound design by Cooper Skinner, with additional sound design by Stephen Perez and April Ruja. Mix and master by Cooper Skinner, with additional mixing by Stephen Perez and Devin Johnson. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set, with additional score by Jay Ragsdale. Video editing by Dylan Harrington. Cover artwork by Trevor Eiler

and Rob Sheridan. Special thanks to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTI, the Nord Group, Station 16, Beck Media and Marketing, and the team at Odyssey.

If you have a Radio Rental story that you'd like to share, please email us at yourscarystory at gmail.com or contact us via the form on our website, radiorentalusa.com or contact us via the form on our website,

RadioRentalUSA.com. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter at Radio Rental. You can also follow the illustrious Terry Carnation on social media. Just search at Terry Carnation. On behalf of the Radio Rental store, we'd love it if you'd subscribe, rate, and review. Thanks for listening.

I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for 20 years and have taken people into haunted places to uncover macabre tales and dark secrets. On my podcast, Haunted Canada, I share bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. Then join me if you dare.